Meet the Data Rescuers: 1

Emily Shawgo is a graduate student at CMU in Public Policy and Management with a focus in Cybersecurity. She works with data and has just started learning to program and came to this event as a way to hone her programming skills and do something to help with the disappearing data problem. She is working on the Bagging team, currently processing GIS data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and is waiting for a 3.3 GB zip file to download. Current mood: impatient.

Anna Filippova and Priya Donti are collaborating on a weather dataset collected from stations across the United States to make sure it’s complete before archiving it.

They chose this dataset because it is well-researched and valuable to lots of agencies and organizations.

Priya is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, and is here because she works on energy research and these data are important to her work and to the public good. Current mood: focused.

Anna is a post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University at the Institute for Software Research and studies community building at events like Data Rescue; the loss of these data sets impact the people in her community. Current mood: excited.

Daniel Gingerich. Photo by Lauren B. Collister, licensed CC-BY.

Daniel Gingerich is a PhD student in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies the “water-energy nexus,” or what the trade-offs are in energy and air quality when treating water. He couldn’t do his research without datasets from the EPA, because private companies would probably not make this information available. Current mood: enthusiastic, because “there are people here who don’t work with these datasets at all, and yet they care enough about data to help preserve it so that work like mine can continue.”